“The required subject—a collective subject—does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed.” M. Fisher

Regenerative Feedback: On Listening And Its Emancipatory Potential, is a four day symposium of talks, presentations, discourse, and performances centered around biological, social, political and cognitive negotiations in music. The first three days of the symposium take place at ISSUE Project Room, and the closing night at Trans-Pecos.

Experimental in form, Regenerative Feedback explores the ethical dimensions, historical circumstances, and cultural resonances of musical artifacts through a series of individual presentations, roundtable conversations, interlocuting performances, and extended Q&As.

The notion of feedback, allegedly dating back to the eighteenth century, has its more recognized roots in the construction of regenerative audio systems: in the amplification of signals. Feeding energy from a device’s output back into its input creates a self-augmenting loop which results in an exponentially stronger output. It’s not difficult to imagine how the implementation of this logic in complex systems could lead -- and has led -- to catastrophic results, but it’s also not untrue that the basic tenets of feedback can be observed at play in successful evolutive organic systems, as well as non-organic technological operations, given the proper regulatory context.

The dream would be that humans all become expert cyberneticians, and explore dreams, intents and efforts, and all their possible impacts, conflicts and resolutions by way of self-regulating orders and systems. Despite the fact that reality may never be so (or it may be that it so already is), is there something to be gained from an investigation into the nature of the feedback loop created by the musical experience (i.e. sound-processing as sound progresses)? Can one aspire to the unspoken balance bespoken by this experience without violently instrumentalizing it? Can one harness the capacity for change and evolution in musical engagements for the sake of a better understanding of human engagements at large? Without assuming this is possible or even the case at all, this Regenerative Feedback aims to uncover the positive feedback mechanisms in the abstract realm that is human musicking.